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Hello!I would offer an opinion, where permissible.You can follow 2 directions; Yogi beara said, " If you come to a fork in the road, take it". If you are designing for a hobby robot, the stressors in the robot will be specific, and thus,you will have fun investigating the dynamics of that.If you are designing a robot for functionality, then I would follow simplicity, reducingdesign time, cost, and repair/programming issues.Have fun, either way you go. I have not given the spine much thought, because I havechosen to follow a path that did not require the use.(?) However, maybe there is an advantageto the addition.insofaras a suggestion, the study of Statics, physics should give an insight to the Free body diagramyou will need to determine loads, then torques, then motors to drive, then amps. The Joys of Robotics!

I'd recommend doing what I'm doing - use modeling clay to sculpt parts, then coat the clay in either thread or cloth dipped in glue to form a hard shell. You can cut the shell in half to remove the clay after and then glue it back together or leave the clay inside if you don't care about the weight.

An interesting idea. You may be able to wash out the clay.

On a related note you may wish to try either burlap (for reinforced strength) or cheesecloth (for details)

Hi Thanks for the tutorial.Can you tell me how to implement Ackerman steering to my front wheels.What equipment I need for the wheels to steer using a servo motor.

Ackerman steering appears to be rare in robots. What I suggest you do is look at RC cars where this type of steering is common, and of course steered by a servo.

I have no interest in RC cars or for that matter wheeled robots but I have a friend who ran RC cars for a while and there is a huge selection of parts for steering gear, it's rather involved. You should be able to adjust your geometry for the length of the vehicle.

Most 4 wheeled robots need some kind of slip to turn sharply with the attention being concentrated on what a robot does and not so much on whether it has efficient steering.

Kinect works with the Raspberry Pi B almost out of the box. I'm going to give it a try.

My thinking of the moment is to use an Arduino Due for the mechanics and the Pi B for the vision. It would seem possible to run everything on the Pi but I think the Due is easier to use with the mechanics (and i2C), also the Pi will have it's hands full.

Down the road (and not far down) the Beagle Bone x15 might be a choice.

I've toyed with openCV before on a few devices and have some Arduino experience but robotics is completely new and I have no experience. I don't mind being told if I'm on the wrong track!

At the moment the fun is beating the exasperation, but I know that will change! Everything is theory now, reality will intervene.

The projectors aren't terribly bright so this would need color filtering to work on something closer to ambient. The article has a nice description on setting up openCV on the Beaglebone, which as I recall, was not trivial.

For my purposes, since my "catbot" is only a foot tall, I just need to know where things are sticking up out of the floor, x distance between vertical lines would be sufficient.